DEG and Remembering March Taylor

Seven years ago in August of 2007, the Society of Collision Repair Specialists (SCRS) and the collision repair community lost a dear friend and tremendous asset with the untimely passing of March Taylor. Those that were fortunate enough to have been touched by March knew him as a dedicated family man, an innovative shop owner, an experienced master technician, and a selfless and iconic collision industry leader and contributor. He was a fixture within SCRS, the SCRS Board of Directors and a mentor to many in various careers and businesses.

March was passionate about addressing inaccurate estimating data and volunteered his time collecting, researching and processing hundreds of database inquiries. He was a technician at heart and was insistent on identifying areas where the data failed to reflect the real world requirements technicians’ face in the repair process. His work was the catalyst and inspiration behind the creation of the Database Enhancement Gateway (DEG), and the concept to have a centralized point for our industry to submit inquiries to.

The DEG (www.degweb.org) is an initiative that was developed to help address collision repair estimates data, through proactive feedback from the collision repair industry to the information providers (IPs) that supply the databases for the various estimating products. The DEG was created, and is equally funded and maintained by SCRS, Alliance of Automotive Service Providers (AASP) and Automotive Service Association (ASA). It is a perfect example of our organization putting membership dollars at work to address real issues in the industry. The DEG has processed more than 7,000 inquiries from the industry, many of which have resulted in changes to the estimating system database, or necessary explanations of how they work.The process is simple, the shop submits the inquiry to the DEG and the administrator works with the representatives from the IPs to bring the inquiry to resolution.

Here are some great recent examples of responsive results from DEG submissions:

If you are using electronic estimating systems to itemize your repair process and price your services, it is important to pay attention to the information being used to create the estimate. Talk to your estimating staff about the DEG and visit www.degweb.org.

The DEG and all of its successes are dedicated to the memory of our good friend, March Taylor.